Searching for your perfect CSA mate

With an explosion of community supported agriculture in recent years, finding a share that fits your needs takes homework

Mar. 22, 2013

Valerie Esposito, of Burlington, unpacks her CSA share from Pete's Greens in Craftsbury. Esposito is a veteran CSA member and says learning how to cook new, less familiar vegetables can be a challenge. 'One thing I like about Pete's is the recipes that come with the food every week. They are very helpful. They try to incorporate all the vegetables.' / MADDIE MCGARVEY/FREE PRESS

Written by

Free Press Staff Writer

How to find a CSA

I found no complete list of all community-supported agriculture farms in Vermont. Two that can be helpful: • The Vermont Agency of Agriculture list has some out-of-date information, but does provide links to the websites of many farms. Go to www.vermontagriculture.com. Click on “Buy Local” and then on the “Buy” tab. • NOFA-Vermont’s list at http://bit.ly/NOFAVTcsas includes brief information on each farm. The list is confusingly organized; the county headings aren’t a reliable guide to which farms are in which county. What to ask before you choose a CSA:

Local Harvest, a national website that helps connect consumers and farmers, offers some advice to those seeking a farm share. Here are some of the questions they suggest asking and a few of my own as well: Know thyself. Ask yourself these questions: • Do I like to cook and does my schedule allow me to make homemade meals most evenings? • Will it be fun to cook vegetables that are new to me? • How will I handle excess produce? (Do you have a neighbor who would like to get some if you get “behind”?) Feeling bad about wasting food is one of the top reasons former CSA members cite for not renewing. • I’ll be paying for my food in advance. Am I willing to accept the unknowns involved in “shared risk”? Talk to the farmer. Among the questions you might ask are these: • How long have you been farming? Doing a CSA? • How much choice is available in the weekly share? • Do you deliver to my town or neighborhood, or do I pick up the food on the farm? • Is there a choice of pickup times? • What happens to my share if I cannot pick it up one week? • Are there items in your box grown by other farms, and if so, which farms? • How did last season go? • How many members do you have? • What percentage of the food you deliver annually is grown on your farm? If the answer is less than 100%, ask where the rest of the food comes from, whether it’s certified organic (if that is important to you), and whether members are told which items come from off-farm. • I’d like to talk with a couple of your members before I commit. Could you give me contact info for a couple of “references?”

Valerie Esposito arrives at her home in Burlington with her week's CSA share from Pete's Greens in Craftsbury. / MADDIE MCGARVEY/FREE PRESS

I married, serially, two wonderful community-supported agriculture farms that provided our family delicious organic food. We honeymooned in a haze of love and leaf lettuce. We reveled in raspberries right off the bush, tomatoes still warm from the sun and, in one case, milk straight from the cow.

But things just didn’t work out in the long run, as so often with hasty marriages.

CSA share No. 1 didn’t provide quite enough food to last a week or justify the inconvenience of driving to the farm at the specified pickup time each week. CSA No. 2 required an hour-long trip and produced such abundance that we ate too much and still wasted food.

The satisfaction of supporting local agriculture slowly faded into a feeling of guilt and inadequacy. We found ourselves in Splitsville.

I’m not alone. Farms that offer CSAs — the arrangement by which consumers pay in advance for weekly shares of vegetables and other farm products — report an annual member turnover that can run as high as 30 percent.

Customers almost never drop out because of dissatisfaction with the quality of the food. Misplaced expectations and the disconnect between romance and reality are more often to blame, farmers, consumers and experts say.

So now, before our family takes the CSA plunge again — and as the sign-up season for summer farm shares begins — I decided to search out advice for myself and others who want to eat locally-grown food and support the farmers who produce it.

How does one forge a CSA relationship that will last? How is one CSA different from another? Once a shopper takes off the rose-colored glasses, what questions should he or she ask before plunking down several hundred dollars?

'Use common sense, talk to the farmer'

There is good news for consumers like me, or for newcomers who want to graduate from farmers market grazing to a more intense farm-to-kitchen connection.

CSA farms have proliferated and diversified in Vermont, so it has become easier to find a good fit for almost any localvore family. Customers pay in advance, agreeing to share with the farmer the risk that one or more crops might fail. In return, they not only share the bounty in good years, but generally pay less for their food than they would at a farmers market.

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“There’s also the relationship,” said Vern Grubinger, a vegetable and dairy specialist with the University of Vermont Extension Service and a 10-year member of the New Leaf CSA in Dummerston.

“You get to feel like you belong to this farm,” he said. “It is exactly the antidote to the American system where everything is anonymous, you don’t know who grew your food, you don’t know the people working in the grocery store, you don’t know what decisions are made to run that business.”

Early on, there was a one-size-fits-all feel to most CSAs: Consumers drove to the farm, where they collected a box of vegetables, the same size box for every customer, with vegetables chosen by the farmer.

It’s a wonder CSAs caught on at all, Grubinger said.

“So much in the CSA model seems to run against the American grain: Inconvenience, lack of choice in what you eat, paying in advance, eating kohlrabi,” he said.

So perhaps it is no surprise that CSAs have evolved. If some consumers have been willing to change the way they shop and eat, CSAs have adapted as well. Most farms, for example, now offer different size shares, differently priced, based on family size.

There are vegetable shares, meat shares, “localvore” shares in which the farm acquires local food from other producers — eggs, perhaps, or cheese, along with artisan bread and preserved food. There are summer shares, winter shares, early spring shares. The Good Eats CSA at Pete’s Greens in Craftsbury, for example, provides five different options for its spring share alone.

Is driving to the farm inconvenient? Many CSAs deliver to neighborhood pickup points. The Intervale Food Hub, a Burlington-based aggregator of food from many producers, delivers to some workplaces.

Want to select your own food from a farm’s seasonal choices? Some farms allow that. At River Berry Farm in Fairfax, for example, a “share” consists of a $250 prepaid debit card that can be used to purchase $275 worth of plants, vegetables and berries at the farm’s retail stand.

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So how’s a consumer to choose?

“You have to use common sense and talk to the farmer,” Grubinger said.

The kohlrabi conundrum

That conversation with the farmer should start with food.

In conversations with Grubinger and a dozen farmers and CSA customers I quickly learned that it’s common for consumers to make the same mistake I did — failing to learn in advance just what kinds of vegetables they can expect to receive in their share, and in what quantity.

“One of my least favorite experiences is the customer who joins our CSA because they think it is the right thing to do to support farmers, and then feels guilty about not using the food,” said Amanda Andrews of Tamarack Hollow Farm in Burlington.

“They come to pick-up and feel they should take everything, so they take the kohlrabi and the Chinese cabbage, but they don’t know how to cook it so it gets wasted. They feel badly, you feel badly,” she said. “A CSA should be pleasurable for everyone.”

“Kohlrabi” and “guilt.” Those words, along with “rutabaga,” recurred in a number of my conversations.

Among the first questions a potential CSA member should ask herself are these: What does my family like to eat? Are they open to trying new foods? Do I enjoy cooking from scratch, and do I have time?

“If your family is used to tomatoes and corn and you start bringing home kohlrabi and Chinese cabbage, well, there’s a process of acclimating your kids to eat it,” said Mary Peabody, a UVM Extension specialist who works with farmers.

In addition, while celeriac and Chinese cabbage are delicious, preparing them takes more time and effort than pulling Birds Eye broccoli out of the freezer.

Valerie Esposito of Burlington has belonged to three CSAs and enjoyed all three, but notes, “You come home from work on a Wednesday and you think ‘What am I going to do with this rutabaga?’”

Vegetables, plain or fancy

There are answers to this concern about the content of a vegetable share. Many farms now provide choice, telling members, for example, to take five pounds of a mix of root vegetables that might include potatoes and carrots as well as rutabagas and turnips.

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Some farms, including Intervale Community Farm, focus on a limited range of common produce.

“We do basic things — tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, broccoli,” said farmer Andy Jones. “We’ll have beets, but if you are looking for beets in four different colors, that’s not us.”

In contrast, a half mile down the dirt road in the Intervale, Spencer and Mara Welton’s Half Pint Farm has carved a niche as a producer of exotic and baby vegetables. Here the weekly share may include heirloom tomatoes, baby artichokes, Japanese cucumbers or cardoons (an artichoke relative cultivated for its edible stem).

“We are foodies,” Mara Welton said. “Our customers tend to be foodies, too, people who like to give dinner parties and people who are adventurous cooks.”

Amy Skelton, CSA manager at Pete’s Greens, notes that most farms have websites with at least a general description of what customers can expect to receive each month through the season. A follow-up conversation with the farmer is recommended.

“You’ll want to know how much food is in the share. What vegetables will you be receiving? Can you make substitutions?” she said.

Produce on the doorstep or hands in the dirt?

As I learned through experience, convenience plays a bigger role than we might wish in whether a CSA relationship is sustainable.

Jennifer Albers of South Burlington joined Rockville Market Farm in Starksboro in part because it is owned by the brother of a good friend. But with one small child and another on the way, pickup location also played a role in keeping her as a member.

“The pickup was just down the street. We could walk over with our little red wagon,” she said. With a child in tow, she preferred to have her vegetables boxed and ready as Rockville did, rather than choosing from bins herself as at a previous CSA.

Albers had to go looking for a farm share again this year, when Rockville announced it would close its CSA to focus on other outlets. Convenience and food choice led her to the Intervale Food Hub because it allows a fully customized food selection.

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“My experience has led me to be really honest about what we will eat,” Albers said. “It’s great to end up with a lot of kale, but not if your family doesn’t eat it.” Instead, the food hub offers choices like local “eggs, syrup and blueberries,” foods her children enjoy.

For other CSA customers, that weekly trip to pick up food on the farm is not an inconvenience but an important motivation to sign up. They seek a deeper connection to a particular farm.

“We all shop to our pocketbooks, but there are a lot of things that are much more important than price,” said Mimi Arnstein, whose Wellspring Farm in Marshfield has 150 members in its 10-year-old CSA.

While some members pick up their shares in Montpelier, many come to the farm. They choose and bag their own food, then spend time in the field picking such harder-to-harvest items as peas and cherry tomatoes.

“We want our members to get their hands a little dirty, experience a connection with where their food comes from,” Arnstein said. “Healthy eating is important, but truly connecting with how food grows, having your hand on a warm cherry tomato, can change lives.”

Jennifer Green of Burlington, a longtime member of the Intervale Community Farm, echoed Arnstein. The weekly trip to the farm isn’t an inconvenience but a pleasure, she said. Intervale members also bag their own produce and harvest their own berries, herbs and flowers.

“It is the experience of getting in the car and going down to the farm, to pick the flowers, to see friends and be part of that community,” Green said. “Just from an aesthetic, visual standpoint, it is the best thing about Burlington on a summer afternoon, when the tomatoes are unloaded from the bin and piled onto the table.”

Vegetable love

I’m not giving up on vegetable love. Thanks to the advice I garnered from farmers and fellow customers, I’ve got a better handle on what sort of CSA will work for my family.

Yes, we’re a small family so we need a small share — particularly because I also enjoy the Burlington Farmers Market. I don’t want so much CSA food in my refrigerator than I can’t justify a Saturday morning browse at the market.

No, I don’t mind the labor of peeling celeriac, scrubbing carrots or trying a vegetable I’ve never cooked before. But, while I love the idea of traveling to a farm and picking my own fresh peas and raspberries as part of my farm share, I must face the fact that a fixed weekly pickup time doesn’t fit into the unpredictable schedule of a journalist.

When I found a farm share rich in spring lettuce and other greens, with local add-ons like cheese and bread — and delivered to a front porch right up the street — I knew I had found my new mate. I’m married to a farm once again.

The best, most succinct advice I received? Perhaps that from Mary Peabody, the UVM Extension specialist.

“Start slow, do your homework — and enjoy it,” she told me. “The happiest day of my month is when I pick up my share.”